Some students got a taste of poverty yesterday at a "hunger banquet" held in Houston Hall.
As attendees walked into the room, they were handed a card that placed them into one of three socioeconomic groups for the night: high income, middle income or low income.
While the high-income group was served ham, pasta and spring water at a table set with dishes and silverware, the low-income group sat on the floor and ate rice.
Together with the Student Coalition Against Hunger, Amnesty International and Penn for Unicef, the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority helped put together the banquet in recognition of Civic House's Anti-Poverty Action Week. Students could pay $2 or donate canned food to participate.
The exercise, according to sorority civic committee member and banquet worker Raina Wallace, was meant to show "the amazing degree to which the circumstances of life are determined by forces outside of our control."
Jim Goodman, head of funding for the Hunger Project, spoke about the causes and consequences of world hunger while students ate.
Goodman acknowledged the progress being made by activists for alleviating hunger, citing former President Bill Clinton and singer Bono, but stressed the importance of finding a long-term solution.
"You have these celebrities throwing money at them, and thinking that all the problems will go away," Goodman said. "It takes more than that."
Instead, Goodman said, effort should be directed to empowering the poor to help themselves through improved education and career training.
"Hungry people are not the problem. Hungry people are the solution," he said.
Engineering graduate student Mpitulo Kala, a native of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said that hearing about people living in poverty stirred up feelings of guilt as well as gratitude.
"It really hit me close to home," he said. "These people could have easily been any one of us. We were lucky."
Over 70 people attended the banquet, and they collectively donated $140 as well as several boxes of canned food.
Amnesty member Jules Shen, a College junior, said that the collaboration of the different groups, who were placed in touch with each other through Civic House, helped draw a larger audience.
"Our turnout was almost double what it was last year, probably because each of the groups could advertise through their own networks," she said.
